Saving the Past...

UPDATE (AB 7/19 PM): IMPORTANT: Brickshelf.com is apparently not going away after all. Kevin Loch has asked everyone to stop trying to download everything, so please respect his request and suspend the efforts described in this post.

As we indicated in updates to an earlier post, a coordinated effort is currently underway to “rescue” as many of the images on Brickshelf.com as possible before they become unavailable after July 31.

In a beautiful, touching sign of how a community can come together in a time of crisis, members of Classic-Castle Forums, Classic-Space Forums, FBTB Forums, and Forum 0937 are showing a remarkable amount of cooperation and cross-collaboration. In addition to saving their own galleries, members are also attempting to ensure that the best LEGO images are saved — especially those originally posted by members of the community who are no longer active or who have since passed away.

If you’d like to participate, you can check out one of the threads on these four forums:

May i just say that brickshelf was one of the most importnt sources in the lego community. from young children’s lego sets that might no even be that good to proffessional builder’s sets to old sets who’s builders might have already died. Some of these sets may never be seen again unless we save them in this great rescue project. The builders and thier creative lego ideas will NOT be forgotten.

Can’t someone buy brickshelf from Kevin Loch? Then all of the images and forum links would remain in tact? Why can’t this be done? I don’t understand. There are a lot of images, but it’s not like you tube or something. Hosting costs can’t be that much?

I propose that people share the file that get with emule or similar system.
We can zip all files from a member in a file with name like this: “brickshelf-lbaixinho.zip” (or rar). So will be easy to find it on these systems of share.

Things have gone sour.. unless there is just a temporary error it appears that you can only back up a user’s account if you are logged in as that user. functionality of the site is diminishing since about noon today.
This means the effort is stalled and may just all together fail
Or maybe there is just a server error and things will keep rolling along :)

I’ve just discovered that users top-level folders are no longer visible: ie. search for “Moko”, click on his name, and the folder is empty. Sub-folders are still visible, though. It makes backing-up a real pain as my favourite Brickshelf users are bookmarked at their top-level folder. Is this a new development?

Anyway, here’s a quick work-around: type – Moko brickshelf – in to Google and click on the Google cache for the top-level page (note that it isn’t always the first result). The Google cache works fine as a substitute top-level page as it links down to the current pages on Brickshelf which are still visible (for now).

But I agree this would be a lot simpler if Kevin would let someone else take over the running of the site & move it to another server. Surely he can’t want to keep the domain name for himself? If it doesn’t turn out that he’s already sold the domain name (hence Brickshelf shutting down) then everyone in the AFOL community should probably keep an eye out and snap it up when it expires. It’s interesting that it was just renewed on the 17th July until August 2008, but I’ve no idea what that means.

Yes: Top-level folders are no longer visible: ie. search for “Moko”, click on his name, and the folder is empty. Sub-folders are still visible, though. It makes backing-up a real pain as my favourite Brickshelf users are bookmarked at their top-level folder.

Anyway, here’s a quick work-around: type – Moko brickshelf – in to Google and click on the Google cache for the top-level page (note that it isn’t always the first result). The Google cache works fine as a substitute top-level page as it links down to the current pages on Brickshelf which are still visible (for now).

But I agree this would be a lot simpler if Kevin would let someone else take over the running of the site & move it to another server. Surely he can’t want to keep the domain name for himself? If it doesn’t turn out that he’s already sold the domain name (hence Brickshelf shutting down) then everyone in the AFOL community should probably keep an eye out and snap it up when it expires. It’s interesting that it was just renewed on the 17th July until August 2008, but I’ve no idea what that means.

(apologies if this post appears twice – I posted it and nothing happened)

HOLLY CR@#(
Notice: Brickshelf will not be shutting down!
We will be offering “featured” accounts for $5/month shortly.
We have received hundreds of supportive emails in the past few days including many who said they would like to contribute financially but did not know how. This has had us rethink the practicality of charging for enhanced features.We plan to do this without reducing current functionality for free users. Thank you for your enormous show of support. IMPORTANT: do NOT try to download the entire site, it causes major problems, slows things down for normal users and you will be permanently blocked. We will make older folders public again after we see the crawlers go away.